gallery

Endlessly versatile soups, stews, and chili are an essential part of the vegetarian repertoire. Packed with vegetables, and often filled with protein-rich beans, these meatless recipes can be great starters or a complete meal in a bowl.

gallery

Those dried beans in your pantry started out as shell beans. But during their brief season, you can buy those same beans fresh in their pods. The fresh beans have an incomparably creamy texture, don’t need to be soaked before cooking, and cook more quickly. One of the most widely available shell beans are cranberry beans, identifiable by their pink-and-cream mottled pods. Edamame and lima beans are other varieties that you may be most familiar with in their frozen forms, but are worth seeking out fresh. Also keep your eyes open for heirloom varieties of shell beans, including scarlet runner, Jacob’s Cattle, Ojo de Cabra (Goat's Eye), and Black Calypso.